Fears California's new voting systems as flawed as the chads

October 8, 2003 — 10.00am

California's recall election to decide the fate of Gray Davis and his challenger for the governorship, Arnold Schwarzenegger, will rely on the use of 11 different ballot systems by up to 15,380,536 eligible voters in 58 counties.

State election officials have said there may be up to 3.2 million absentee votes cast. They estimate these would take about four weeks to count, delaying the result until early next month.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 was introduced to prevent a recurrence of the 2000 presidential election, where the result swung on the fate of "chads" - the pieces punched out of a voting card. Under this legislation, the old-tech lever and punch card ballot machines will be replaced by computerised or optical scanning devices by January, 2006. The federal contribution to this change will be $US3.9 billion ($5.6 billion).

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The problem is that the difficulties and conflicts this legislation sought to resolve now loom larger than ever.

While software and encryption experts had been voicing their disquiet about flaws in computerised voting for two years, it was a study in July by the prestigious Johns Hopkins University of software used by the Diebold company that brought them to public attention.

Aviel Rubin and other researchers found that a voter using a homemade version of the smart card required to activate the touch screens could cast multiple votes.

The software programming language was also vulnerable, with hackers or insiders theoretically able to insert "back doors" into the software, allowing votes to be changed. Diebold disputed these findings.

Other computer experts have suggested that a politically connected hacker could monitor voting through the machines in real time, influencing election day campaign choices and resources.

After the release of the Johns Hopkins report, a study commissioned by the state of Maryland, which had paid $US55 million for new machines, found 328 security weaknesses, 26 of them critical.

Fourteen California counties with 3.5 million registered voters will use the Diebold system. The system records their choices on a touch screen, but does not print them out.

"The screen says your vote has been counted," said Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, spelling out the scenario to Congress in May. "As you exit the voting booth, you begin to wonder: how do I know if the machine actually recorded my vote correctly? The fact is, you don't. No one knows."

Instead, election officials will review printouts for 1 per cent of votes from their location and compare them with the digital record.

At stake are voting machine purchases worth more than a billion dollars. The contract for Los Angeles County alone is worth at least $US90 million, the county voting registrar, Conny McCormack, said.

Two of the companies have strong connections to the Republican Party. Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, recently sent a letter to prospective Republican Party donors pledging "to deliver electoral votes" to President George Bush in Ohio.

Half of the machines in the US are made by Election Systems and Software (ESS). The company holds a near monopoly on voting machines in Nebraska, which in 1996 elected its first Republican senator in 24 years. That senator, Chuck Hagel, was the chairman of the ESS predecessor until March, 1996.

On the eve of the California election, Ms McCormack believes her low-tech system will withstand scrutiny.

"We're confident in the punch card system," Ms McCormack said. "We thought it was discontinued inappropriately. That [introducing computerised voting] was more just an hysterical reaction to a virtual tie vote in Florida. You can't blame it on the system."